On Christmas Eve, passengers on a snowbound train disembark and in this instance, take refuge in a country house. All too soon they realize the blinding storm has obliterated any possibility of finding the station.

Our protagonists are a group of strangers who share a compartment on a train and get stuck in a snowstorm just days before Christmas. I can greatly appreciate a mischievous approach to structure that allows the police to appear only in the penultimate chapter, as Farjeon uses here. More than 155,000 copies in the series have been sold this year, but with Mystery in White accounting for 60,000 of those sales. Contrived Coincidence: The mere fact that the party ends up in Valley House while the mystery there plays out would be enough, but that all of this should happen on the 20th anniversary of John Strange’s murder just blows everything past all probability.After this delightfully intriguing start, things get more and more puzzling for the trapped visitors. The character holding the mystery element of the story together relied a bit too much on info dumping in chunks and no puzzle fan will be impressed with the statement: ‘I am groping my way through sensations as well as known or deduced facts,’ nor ‘When you find the atmosphere facts resolve themselves inside it.

On the way, they come across an unlocked house with dinner laid, kettle boiled and a fire on, but no one seemingly at home. I preferred Mystery in White to that one, but I have yet to find one of these BLCC mysteries that comes close to a Christie or a Sayers. Mostly written by contemporaries of crime legend Agatha Christie, they are a time when without modern technology, crimes had to be solved by old fashioned sleuthing by detectives, police officers, or sometimes just those affected by the crimes. While the guard and other passengers all stood around gaping at the body, Hopkins decided to try and get to Hemmersby and find a policeman.This is not exactly a ghost story, but there certainly is a rather creepy element to the whole story, though it’s handled lightly and left up to the reader to decide.